Exploring Care-Based Methods for Designing Multimodal Research With Early Career Scholars

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Critical Care–Based Research Methodologies: Training the Next Generation of Qualitative School-Based Researchers

Abstract

Conducting research with and involving young people (birth – 18 years) is intimate and mindful work. It requires relational approaches that afford vulnerability, care, and criticality (Kerr et al., 2020). Research with young people also requires that researchers take time to thoughtfully design and practice the methods used for data collection, analysis, and representation. In this session, I share recent experiences co-creating a working group which supported graduate students interested in designing research projects with or involving youth participants which also used multimodal approaches. I show some of the ways our working group explored care-based research methods (Authors, 2022) alongside theories of multimodality to create a digital synchronous and asynchronous space to share in-process qualitative multimodal research throughout different stages of the design process. I argue that exploring care-based methods with graduate and early career scholars is an important aspect of how to navigate designing qualitative multimodal research projects.
As early career researchers, the members of our group were interested in pursuing new avenues for collecting, analyzing, and sharing data, specifically with young people. Noting that many qualitative educational research projects rely heavily on the spoken and written word, our working group explored the variety of communication modes young people choose to make meaning. We define multimodality as the “multiple means of meaning making” (Jewitt et al., 2016, p. 2) people employ to communicate. Together we explored this definition along with multimodal approaches such as: digital artifact creation, digital colleges, sound/song creation, podcasting, social media applications and photography.
Our group acknowledged that new methods bring possible entrance to uncharted ethical territory. Relying on care-based methodologies as outlined by Authors (2022a) helped to establish a working group that explored multimodal approaches while both explicitly and implicitly drawing from tenets of care-based research. We focused on tenets such as “question[ing] the conditions of schools that detract from youth’s wellbeing” (p. 10) while designing methods which “honestly communicate…an understanding of the limit of reciprocity between researchers and youth (p.11). We also “attend[ed] to our own needs while doing work with youth” (p. 11). These care-based tenets helped us to identify and play with tensions in our various research projects, such as how a method that was intended to gather information might also replicate a condition of schooling. It also guided a shared inquiry into the role of privacy and protection when conducting research with and involving youth.
A shared endeavor of our group was to attend to our own needs as beginning researchers by establishing a scholarly collective within a university space that left room for us to breathe (Frank, 2010) and play with research design at various stages, what we refer to as in-process. We viewed our group in contrast to mainstream university research spaces that are highly structured, top-down, and faculty-driven. In this session I share some digital resources and play spaces we created with and for our working group to explore how multimodal approaches and care-based research offer a way to teach designing qualitative research.

Author

• Katherine Newhouse, New York University
  Presenting Author